From the “Lewandowsky needs to broaden his reach for nutters” department and the GWPF:
Pope’s Climate Adviser Fails (Again)
A Cambridge professor who claimed that assassins may have murdered three British scientists investigating the impact of global warming has had a complaint against The Times dismissed by the press regulator. Peter Wadhams said in an interview that he feared he might also have been targeted himself. When his comments were published byThe Times, the academic complained that he had been misquoted and that the newspaper had breached a duty of confidentiality towards him. An investigation by the Independent Press Standards Organisation has found that Professor Wadhams did make the claims reported and has cleared the newspaper of breaching the editors’ code of practice. –David Brown, The Times, 28 September 2015
Peter Wadhams is something of a favourite at [Bishop Hill], his researches into the paranormal, his physics-free sea-ice predictions and his concerns about assassination having provided readers with much entertainment over the years. The last of these claims led to an official complaint to the Press Regulator, but it seems that Prof Wadhams’ complaint has been no more successful than his doom-laden predictions about the Arctic. Prof Wadhams is an advisor to Pope Francis. –Andrew Montford, Bishop Hill, 28 September 2015
In other news, Wadhams was equally wrong about Arctic sea ice this year:
Maybe it is time for this man to just shut up and go away.
Crying werewolf?
There wolf.
Lol!
There castle.
Frau Blucher. Neigh.
Its only a model.
Paranoia is a serious mental condition, not for joking about. This on the other hand…..
On top of that, what usually gets called paranoia in the popular media falls far short of what would necessary for a psychiatric diagnosis of paranoia.
Paranoia is very specifically the delusion that everyone is out to get you.
A belief that a particular person or even group of people want to kill you is not paranoia, even if it is delusional.
just because you suffer from paranoia, it doesn’t mean that they are not out to get you. 😉
Wadhams has an over-inflated opinion on himself and his repeatedly FAILED PREDICTIONS of an ‘ice-free’ Arctic by 2015 AND/OR 2016.
He is a founding member of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group. N. Shakhova research has often been cited by the group and Wadhams. Her work has been laughed at by the Warmists at Real Climate.
Holocene Climate Optimum = ‘ice-free’ Arctic = we are still here and apparently no catastrophic spike in the ice-cores.
Who would need to harm a man who says this?
Such people need to be shown pity, and should be afforded all the protection society can provide such as a well padded cell.
Did you know he is an ‘expert’ on Arctic sea ice and waves and has ‘studied’ the Arctic since 1970? Someone call an ambulance.
I forgot the FT Magazine link for the last Wadhams quote.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/4084c8ee-fa36-11e2-98e0-00144feabdc0.html
“Did you know he is an ‘expert’ on Arctic sea ice and waves and has ‘studied’ the Arctic since 1970? Someone call an ambulance.”
Perhaps he is rather like Toonces, The Cat Who Could Drive a Car:
No one ever said he was a good driver.
… with delusions of grandeur.
“Prof Wadhams is an advisor to Pope Francis.”
Maybe he just needs an exorcism.
Wadhams or the Pope ?
How many time has Anthony’s life been threatened?…by the “peaceful” green 10:10 anti human death worshipping marxists?
“No Pressure”
Send Wadhams a bill for the cost of the investigation.
“Maybe it is time for this man to just shut up and go away” (oh how cruel, he can’t help it!)
Perhaps he needs to go to the sanatorium where all retired climate “scientists” will end up!
…. or rehab
.
Isn’t it obvious?
Delusional on so many levels….nutter for sure. So many climate nut jobs…they just make me sigh and face palm.
Philip Tetlock, a psychology professor from the University of Pennsylvania, made his name from a study that has become an academic classic. After 20 years’ work analysing almost 30,000 predictions by hundreds of experts in television, radio and newspapers, he came to two startling conclusions. First, the experts performed no better than chance — or, as he put it, no better than a chimp with a dartboard. Second, the more eminent the expert the worse the prediction.
He has now published a book (‘Superforecasting’ – Random House) based on further research in which he set up a competition to get ordinary people to make predictions to see to see if they outperformed experts and what distinguished those who performed best.
The questions they were asked, over several years, were often arcane. How will H5N1 influenza spread? What movement can be expected in the Spanish gilts market? Will there be an attack carried out by Islamist militants in France, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Spain, Portugal or Italy between January 21 and March 31 next year?
Working from home, with each competition lasting a year, people across the US offered their predictions. Many did badly. Yet some consistently got the correct answers. These forecasters included pensioners and pharmacists, computer programmers and academics. They were sometimes experts in one field, but not in many others. In his book, Professor Tetlock investigates what they were doing. His conclusion was in some senses mundane. They read around a subject, they kept an open mind, they were prepared to change their mind and they broke down problems into manageable chunks.
Professor Tetlock says that good judgement “is about being willing to change your mind in response to evidence. It’s a very painful, granular belief, updating in response to subtle or not so subtle clues in the news.
An important message for Prof Wadhams and the rest of the CAGW mob, but more importantly for our politicians, if only they would take it on board. Contributors to this blog are, of course, familiar and comfortable with the approach.
Is Tetlock’s 20-year study available?
Don’t know Jim, but I haven’t had a chance to search yet.
Dr. Tetlock is a Social Psychologist, and situated in the Management Department at the Wharton B-School at U-Penn. I have worked with some of his fellow faculty, and he strikes me as incredibly common-sensical. I suspect he would be happy to share the data, his personal web page at Wharton is accessible through the link below, I think you will find it very interesting and informative.
Old’u, thanks for reminding about this…
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/tetlock/
I used to believe in global warming, as recently as a few years ago, when the USDA changed my agricultural zone. We’d had an almost snowless winter, and I thought gosh, it must be true. Then I heard that some people were disputing it…I guess it was hearing about the “pause”. So I started looking into it, and have been horrified to learn about the shoddy, so-called science upon which this is all based.
We’ve had two record breaking cold and snowy winters since, and many of the plants I thought could now handle our new winters are dead. Honestly, I’d much rather have milder winters (snow is no fun when you’re in a wheelchair!). But I’d much rather have an economy not hampered by nonsense.
Katherine,
Turn that wheelchair into sleigh chair for the winters. ; )
If only I had a horse to pull me!!!
I omitted to acknowledge that the above is based on an item in The Times today.
As The Times is behind a paywall this link explains the process:-
http://edge.org/conversation/philip_tetlock-edge-master-class-2015-a-short-course-in-superforecasting-class-i
It’s a bit long winded but the important point is that forecasting should be scored for its accuracy.
It’s a point I’ve tried to make on the Guardian environmental pages (silly me).
One example I gave was comparing Leona Libby’s forcast for the climate made to the Los Angeles Times in January 1979, to that of James Hansen’s congressional testimony in June 1988. Libby predicted warming till the end of the century then cooling, based on fourier analysis of her isotope ratio tree ring data. Where as Hansen’s models scenarios all said runaway global warming. The Guardianistas ignored Hansen’s abject failure, and said Libby was guilty of ‘curve fitting’ (?? w-tf-uwt ??) and clearly wrong as it hasn’t stopped warming.
Non so blind…..etc, etc…
Old’un…I seem to recall a study in mathematics on estimating numbers that the county fair game of “how many jelly beans in the jar” will result in wildly incorrect guesses but the average will be very near the truth. Could be related to the “expert” distribution as well maybe?
I fear financial collapse encourageded by climate nutters who ignore the observed record and insist the models identified by the IPCC as useless are still valuable if only to invoke one of the great logical fallacies, the precautionary principle.
The cat was already let out of bag two years ago by Bill McKibben, “We have already melted the Arctic.”
https://theconversation.com/q-a-bill-mckibben-crunches-australias-climate-numbers-14963
I don’t think that Bill has been assassinated, for surely, he would have been the first one.
Did they run a cruise ship through the northwest passage this year? I think the one last year got stuck and a good time was had by all. I don’t recall seeing any hoopla about it this year. I wonder if the boat down under is still sailing? I mean surely with the Arctic melted this should be common practice by now. There is probably a reason as to how global warming is preventing the ice from being melted.
The Ponant Cruise Line sent two cruise ships through the passage this year.
How many of these people have been assassinated? An over-inflated opinion of one’s sell me thinks.
Methinks it is Professor Wadhams sanity that is melting away.
He does strike me as a pretty good exemplar of the classic CAGW alarmist academic. An utter lightweight, starved of a sense of importance and any real respect intellectually, desperate beyond reason to get noticed. Does like to have his picture taken looking happy though. They all just have a certain look about them it seems to me.
Bingo!
We’ve all seen these guys lingering around the fringe of any productive activity…(maybe) a high IQ, but low maturity. Willing to share credit or make up nonsense. as proof of their “deeper” understanding.
He has been off his medication for some time now. Can’t we all get some help for this man? He deserves pity and psychotic medication.
In order to have no ice in the arctic, one would have to time travel back to 1962…
Isn’t that earlier.
I have not checked the picture, but is this not a picture of the nautilus and her sister submarine in the Arctic back in about 1958?
I might be mistaken. Perhaps this is the Seadragon and Skate taken in 1962.
richard verney
yup it is the skate and the seadragon linked from no other than WUWT! 1962… I know there were earlier circa 1950s voyages to the ice free north pole in 51? but I know this photo was reputable.
Paul Westhaver, I’m sure you know this but an ice-free north pole is not unusual. I used to think it was until I found THESE with references before 1950 and after.
Example:
Also note that 1979 is the maximum sea ice extent on the satellite record. Though there is Nimbus of the 1960s! Note the months these observations were taken.
And at the other end, Mawson, 1911, the Antarctic was pretty ice free too!
“Leading Arctic expert”? (in last pic)
Blimey. What are the others like??
Well, they’ve been ‘assassinated,’ so no way to know for sure….
Did they use ice bullets?
Try Paul Beckwith, PhD student of the University of Ottawa, who predicted that no sea ice would survive the 2013 summer:
http://ontario.sierraclub.ca/en/node/6035
I note that there was a link to his blog, and when I clicked on that the page was not found:
“Home Search form Search Search
Page not found
The requested page “/en/blog/paul-beckwith” could not be found.”
Perhaps too many people have been asking him about his 2013 prediction, and he does not wish to admit that he got his prediction wrong!
Will these people never learn? At the very least, one should not make a prediction that can be tested in one’s academic lifespan, or it will inevitable come back to haunt when the prediction does not pan out.
That’s why I printed stuff out and save it to flash drive…. on a computer that doesn’t see the internet. A computer that doesn’t have wireless Internet capability is very valuable.
richard verney,
Paul Beckwith’s failed prediction is below.
http://atlantic.sierraclub.ca/en/node/6035
http://www.elephantjournal.com/2013/03/breaking-arctic-ice-breaks-up-in-beaufort-sea-paul-beckwith/
This year’s Arctic Ice minimum was roughly 2 million KM^2 above the 2012, and “only” about 5 million KM^2 off from being “ice free”.
Once the AMO approaches its 30-yr cool cycle in about 5 years, Arctic ice extents will slowly continue to recover back to 1980’s levels over time.
Wadham is barking mad… The poor man needs to go back in his meds..and the CAGW alarmists call skeptics conspiracy nutters…
Yeah, right…
I thought I had read that “ice free” didn’t actually mean that all the ice was gone, merely that a sufficient amount had gone away to permit navigation across the Arctic Sea. Is that correct?
Who knows? Maybe “ice free” means it’s 1500 feet thick and extends down to Chicago. This is a natural consequence of “portable goal posts”.
It’s my understanding that “ice free” is defined as summer minimum of 1 KM^2.
Only in Climate-La-La-Land would a million square kilometers of ice be considered ‘ice-free’.
Beware of asking for your Coke ‘ice-free’ at fast food restaurants!
Navigation can be done from armchair in London, the question is can you safely travel without an ice breaker, or without a tribe of Eskimos.
Could be. I read a few years ago that 1,000,000 km² was considered “ice free.”
As others have pointed out, ice free does not mean no ice whatsoever, and it only applies to sea ice.
Billy Liar – I may be a lukewarmer, but that doesn’t mean I want my Coke that way. ^¿^
“Ice free” is defined as whatever is needed to “validate” predictions of “no” Arctic ice made by Wadhams, Gore, Serrezze, Mazlowski, Beckwith, Hansen and other Arctic Ice geniuses
‘ICE FREE’ is generally ‘accepted’ as 1 million km2 or less, as it is very difficult to melt the thick multi-year ice in the Canadian Archipelago. I don’t quibble about this otherwise the debate will grind to a halt.
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/31/12571.abstract
http://www.atmos.pku.edu.cn/yhu/pnas-liu-2013.pdf
For comparison, a million km2 is more than two Californias, and almost a Texas and a half.
Given the Ecomentalist propensity to accuse others of the same things they themselves are doing or planing on doing, maybe we should be keep an eye out.
I have no doubt that if blood is split in the AGW debate it will be at the hand of the Greens.
Not merely paranoia. Delusions of grandeur are required. You have to believe that you are important enough to be on a sh** list.
michael
I don’t know. While I agree that Alarmist have given us plenty of examples over the last decade of a tendency to promote violence toword skeptics, that doesn’t preclude the opposite. Especially if we see significant cooling in the next 5 years. The number of additional deaths during the last few bad winters have already grown into the 10’s of thousands. If those grow significantly during dropping global temps after all these years of Warmist promotion then their will be a massive public backlash. People who are suffering will naturally lash out at those they view as having given them false advise.
Think about the Italian sismologists who told the public they had little to fear weeks before a major earthquake. And they HAD no reason to suspect an immanent event. Meanwhile climate scientists and ‘communicators’ really have been caught in numerous questionable acts. You can bet all those ‘temperature adjustments’ are going to be a lot harder to defend if the global average is dropping hard.
schitzree, You are correct. For the future, but I don’t think these people see themselves as villains. and see some form of ahem “social Justice” being leveled against themselves.
michael
Every photo I’ve seen of Wadhams has that perma-grin look, that we would associate with folks who had one too many …. (fill in your personality altering substance of choice here) …
I really can’t imagine why Cambridge isn’t taking extraordinary action to move him into retirement, this kind of PR is not at all good for academic institutions that are slowly but surely losing the trust of the public.
It all brings in money from the likes of gates, branson et al. AND who put up the money for his protest.
>>Is not at all good for academic institutions that are
>>slowly but surely losing the trust of the public.
I thought that trust had expired long ago, in most categories.
Scientist – just take the opposite of what they say, and you have a good approximation of the truth.
Met Office – just take the opposite of what they say, and you have a good forecast.
BBC – just take the opposite of what they say, and you understand the news.
Westminster – just take the opposite of what they say, and you know the political situation.
Teachers – just understand that a 2010s A+ is a 1960s C+.
Religion – just understand that ‘peace’ means ‘subjugation’.
And so it goes on…
Paul Westhaver September 28, 2015 at 8:42 am
In order to have no ice in the arctic, one would have to time travel back to 1962…
//////////////////////////////////////
Paul suggests that his picture is a picture taken in 1962. My initial impression was that it is a phot of the Nautilus and the Skate, and in which case it was taken in 1958.
Anyway, the precise date is not material, since the material point being made is that the ice conditions at the date of the photograph (whatever the date actually is) is less than the ice extent of today.
Anyone interested in this should read John Daly’s blog: http://www.john-daly.com/thin-ice.htm
This is well worth a look at.
Also, there are some satellite photographs taken in 1974 or 1975 which show considerably less Arctic ice extent compared to today, and it was the increase in Arctic ice in the early 1970s through to the late 1970s that gave rise to the Global Cooling scare.
The warmists like to use 1979 as the start date for this discussion since it coincides with a high. Arctic ice seems to have peaked at this time.
Earlier this year, I saw a programme on the Franklin expedition (circa 1845), and the search for one of the wrecks. The search vessel which was making its way through the North West passage frequently got stuck in ice and one of the scientists said that the ice conditions were very similar to the ice conditions that Franklin would have experienced in 1845. They were not suggesting that the ice was more extensive in 1845, but rather that it was similar to today!
See also (at john Daly’s blog):
http://www.john-daly.com/polar/arctic.htm
Richard,
Thanks for posting that link. The late, great John Daly is sorely missed.
From the link, the North Pole is melting!
http://www.john-daly.com/NP1987.jpg
Oh, wait… that was 28 years ago.
Nevermind.
The Super-B
Reputed to be the fastest sub ever commissioned.
If I tell you more, I will have to kill you – it’s that sensitive . . . . .
Mods – Yes – /SARC [in huge buckets-full!]
Exceptionally blooming big buckets, note!
No animosity intended or expected or reflected.
Doesn’t homogenisation make for dull comments? – even if it makes milk safer.
Auto
[Reply: When we figure out what you’re saying, we will decide whether to censor you out of existence forever, or elevate your comment to a full article. ~mod.]
“even if it makes milk safer.”
I think that is Pasteurization.
The homogenization just makes it so you cannot get the cream off the top, or make butter with it, and you never need to shake it up.
I think there was a joke there Auto, but it eluded me at the last second.
Which proves that I, for one, am not the hit man chasing him.
I think Auto is sitting in the corner with a pair of general British Army issue “Y” fronts over Auto’s head, two pencils stuck up Auto’s nose and Auto muttering the word “Wibble”. But maybe Baldrick has a cunning plan?
Hee–ee-eey, now…Auto is my bud!
I, for one, would love to see a satellite photo from 1974.
Can you suggest search terms?
Yes I was correcting Verney’s mis-statement about it being Nautilus and Skate. It’s actually Skate and Snapdragon on 2 August 1962.
richard verney September 28, 2015 at 10:26 am
Paul Westhaver September 28, 2015 at 8:42 am
In order to have no ice in the arctic, one would have to time travel back to 1962…
//////////////////////////////////////
Paul suggests that his picture is a picture taken in 1962. My initial impression was that it is a phot of the Nautilus and the Skate, and in which case it was taken in 1958.
If it was taken in 1958 it was not taken at the pole since the first sub to surface there was the Skate in 1959.
I got the photo from wuwt’s web page which labels it 1962 (Skate and Seadragon) at pole.
dbstealey, see my comment on the north pole ice free here. It happened before 1950 and is not unusual. Warmists trumpet ‘ice-free’ north pole knowing readers will lap up this nonsense.
There is a most revealing interview with Professor Peter Wadhams on spirit today.
He is an Englishman rejecting Englishness, is convinced that a spiritual realm exists which is of more central importance to the progress of the universe than the physical realm and has precognitive dreams occasionally.
Not that it’s not a better way to acquire foreknowledge of climate than running computational models on supercomputers, still, it’s not incorporated into the scientific method completely, so far.
Prof. Wadhams is the cuckoo that keeps on laying eggs.
Is the Arctic ice free? There are more creative ways of answering that question than obsessing on the definition of “ice free”. One may apply the Bill Clinton technique and focus on “what the definition of ‘is’ is”. Employ this approach to most any scientific question of fact and one finds that “scientific truth” does not rest “on the back of a great turtle” as some suppose, but rather on a pair of mason’s knee-pads, sometimes called Lewinskys.
In just June of this year, Wadhams submitted an Arctic sea ice prediction for the NSIDC September 2015 average extent of 984,000 km2.
This was by far the lowest outlier of any prediction (and I assume, symbolically, below the 1.0M threshold that has been talked about before as being essentially an ice-free Arctic).
The NSIDC September average is coming in at 5,600,000 km2 with 3 days left to go, so Wadhams was off by a wild 82%.
Wadhams forecast below for June and he chose to leave it at this figure in subsequent months.
http://www.arcus.org/files/sio/23168/seaiceandpolaroceanographygroup_u_cambridge_june2015.pdf
Sorry, that should read the NSIDC September ice extent is coming in at 4,600,000 km2 and Wadhams is 79% out.
Bill Illis,
Wouldn’t that make Wadhams’ prediction be off by about 467%?
I suggest independent critics (aka skeptics) of there being significant AGW to encourage Peter Wadhams to continue to entertain us in public with his intellectually comedic/tragic theatre. He promotes fiction which he hopes desperately will be believed by the theatre audience.
John
There’s a bad guy out there and:
“He’s got ’em on the list — he’s got ’em on the list;
And they’ll none of ’em be missed — they’ll none of ’em be missed.”
(Credit to Gilbert and Sullivan!)
“Maybe it is time for this man to just shut up and go away.” There are hundreds of CAGW/Global Warming/Climate Change adherents that I would say this about too.
How did this guy get to be a professor. He must have done something good.
He did not do anything good. What he has done and continues to do is to make sh!t up, spread alarm and bask under the media spotlight. After a failed prediction he stamps his foot up and down and claims people are out to get him. Pathetic little man of zero sense.
People have become unable to distinguish between someone who talks loud and someone with something to say.
Or knows of what one speaks.
Why? Paul Ehrlich didn’t get where he is now (Grand Master of the Doom Cult) by going away after making
a fewmanynothing but bad predictions. In fact, the wronger he is, the more fawning attention he receives. Like Elvis, there’s a proven market for Paul Ehrlich impersonators.I would suspect warming proponents if he has credible evidence that he may be targeted. Skeptics certainly don’t want this guy replaced – he’s a double agent!! sarc/
Paranoid may well be the correct diagnosis.He also maintains methane will destroy the planet.
This guy should be put under the care of Lewandowsky.
Maybe we can have Toonces drive him there.
The poor man must be feeling a bit like Julius Caesar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvs4bOMv5Xw
James Bull
It is one thing to be a buffoon. but to be a very loud buffoon, and in public no less, is most decidedly in awful taste.